I am confused

Either it is ‘left’ to provisionally accept that the people of Iran have chosen Ahmadinejad as their president, rejecting the claims of the western media, which because of its bourgeois pro-liberal democracy and/or Islamophobic bias, and intensified by its automatic enthusiasm for social networking technology, is supporting a tiny elite segment of the middle class against the rest of the population in a purely ideological operation that may even be a psyop of some kind – while nevertheless ‘wishing all the best‘ to the protesters (who may not all fit the stereotype), confident that if carefully parsed this position is not self-contradictory –

or it is ‘left’ to do the near opposite: unconditionally support the protesters as a 21st century revolutionary vanguard while ignoring the western media, which because of its bourgeois elitist bias has blindly conflated all of rural and working-class Iran with support for Ahmadinejad (just like it was said to be only dumb country folk who ‘voted’ for Chavez), an ideological move thinly disguised by its hyper-empirical posture of  awaiting absolute proof.

This is as good an argument as any against a cavalierly voluntarist attitude toward the post-Althusserian notion that “there is no outside of ideology.” Maybe that claim should be understood to mark a historical problem and not a simple statement of fact.

Just so I’m not accused of the ideological academic neutrality of free-floating petty bourgeois intellectuals, I grudgingly (there’s no serious way to do otherwise) favor option A.

UPDATES:

new real news:

the evil new york times is liveblogging the major protest happening right now. (Canavan’s got that and other links elsewhere on the blog)

And 3arabawy, who I’ve been stealing a lot of links from, has lots more good ones, continually updated.

UPDATES AGAIN

Not that anyone needs me to link to this, but lenin’s latest on this is really good. Takeaway point:

The idea that the protests are just a flash mob for the crooked neoliberal sector of the elite is unsustainable. The question of whether, in practise, all these protests do is strengthen one faction of the ruling class will be decided to a large extent by the protesters themselves. There is a huge generational shift underlying these protests, and that means that even if the present wave were to fizzle out – which I don’t think is likely – it is likely to recur in even more militant forms.

OK, LAST ONE:

If legit, this is something:

Members of the Assembly of Experts are reported to be considering making changes to the Iranian system of government that would be the biggest since Ayatollah Khomeini set up the Islamic system in the revolution of 1979, by removing the position of the supreme leader.

…

Clerical leaders are also said to be considering forcing the resignation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad following over a week of unrest since he was elected in what senior opposition leaders claim was a fraudulent election.

Superficial symmetry

…and category errors:

“But two of civilization’s institutions, though not physically present, are constantly alluded to in the act of torture, and so hover behind and arch over the physical reality of the sealed room. Like the domestic objects, these institutions are unmade by being made weapons. The first is, of course, the trial. In its basic outlines, torture is the inversion of the trial, a reversal of cause and effect. While the one studies evidence that may lead to punishment, the other uses punishment to generate the evidence.”

— Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

via

“The second institution ubiquitously present by inversion is medicine…the institution of medicine like that of justice is deconstructed, unmade by being made at once an actual agent of the pain and a demonstration of the effects of pain on human consciousness.”

— E.S.

“There are highly trained professionals questioning these extremists and terrorists. We have professionals who are trained in this kind of work.”

–George W. Bush

“Holding the Bush administration responsible for torture would give us some high political drama that would feed the media goat for the next two years and also sap the body politic. The healthcare system would go unfixed, schools would crumble, basic public services would deteriorate, all so that the left could have at the right. I am an old museum-quality Northern liberal, and I know something about the righteousness of my confreres. I’ve been with old lefty friends who can get emotional about the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the innocent men railroaded to the gallows, but dear hearts, it happened in 1886. Let’s move on.”

— Garrison Keillor

“Though indisputably real to the sufferer, [pain] is, unless accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to others. This profound ontological split is a doubling of pain’s annihilating power: the lack of acknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as a form of self-extension) becomes a second form of negation and rejection, the social equivalent of the physical aversiveness. This terrifying dichotomy and doubling is itself redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because instead of the person’s pain being subjectively real but unobjectified and invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible, as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world, and yet it is simultaneously categorically denied.”

— E.S.

“It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.”

— Attorney General Eric Holder

“Although the torturer dominates the prisoner both in physical acts and verbal acts, ultimate domination requires that the prisoner’s ground become increasingly physical and the torturer’s increasingly verbal, that the prisoner become a colossal body with no voice and the torturer a colossal voice (a voice composed of two voices) with no body, that eventually the prisoner experience himself exclusively in terms of sentience and the torturer exclusively in terms of self-extension.”

“The motive for torture is to a large extent the equivalent, though in a different logical time, of the fictionalized power; that is, one is the falsification of the pain and one the falsification after the pain. The two together form a closed loop of attention that ensures the exclusion of the prisoner’s human claim. Just as the display of the weapon (or agent or cause) makes it possible to lift the attributes of pain away from the pain, so the display of motive endows agency with agency, cause with cause, thereby lifting the attributes of pain still further away from their source. If displaying the weaponry begins to confer the prisoner’s pain into the torturer’s power, displaying the motive (and the ongoing interrogation means that it is fairly continually displayed) enables the torturer’s power to be understood in terms of his own vulnerability and need.”

— E.S.

The House today passed a $106 billion bill funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through September, as House Democrats backed President Obama despite misgivings among the ranks about his strategy in Afghanistan.

The 226 to 202 vote came after Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner had called some reluctant Democrats during the day imploring them to back the bill, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had strongly pressed her colleagues in a closed-door meeting to vote for the bill in a show of support for Obama, even if they oppose his strategy for increasing troops in Afghanistan. . . .

“We are in the process of wrapping up the wars. The president needed our support,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who had earlier said he opposed the war funding but voted for it in the end. “But the substance still sucks” . . . .

House Democrats had put off the vote for more than a week, looking to win support for the bill. President Obama, who had pushed to insert a provision in the bill to bar the release of photos depicting abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad, demanded the Senate take out the provision to win votes from House liberals who said they would not support the war bill if the photo ban was included.

In the end, 19 House Democrats backed the bill who had opposed it the first time, although some cited loyalty, not agreement with Obama’s plans, as their reason.

“I want to support my president,”said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who changed her no vote to a yes.

via Greenwald

Responsibilities of a pundit

Struggling to keep up with events in Iran yesterday occasioned some good discussions with friends, which in turn generated a few thoughts on responsibility. I’ll try to keep them brief.

The idea that allegiance to one side or another is a universal responsibility is usually taken to be constitutive of politics. Much like the injunction to get a job, this demand is usually preceded by an acknowledgment that one really wants something else: a pure utopia of some kind, or just to be lazy, ‘absolutely’ free, to give the finger to someone in authority, etc.

That is, responsible politics tends to be articulated from a position of more or less tragic realism.

An example. Mainstream commentators on the Iranian post-election protests think the election was obviously rigged in favor of a politician they were already contemptuous of, Ahmadinejad. The people on the street are therefore ‘good’ rioters who just want freedom from tyranny, like the CIA-backed ‘popular struggle’ against Chavez. Insofar as they support Mousavi, the pro-economic liberalization reform opponent, veering no further left, they will remain good. Liberal reform is “realistic,” “college-educated,” “urban,” “tech-savvy,” and “at least it’s better than Islamofascism.”

On the other side, a number of left commentators are willing to at least water down critique of Ahmadinejad’s reactionary views and repressive policies in order to resist this sort of propagandizing appropriation by the western press. I’ve even seen it argued in the past that it’s “every socialist’s responsibility” to “support” the Islamic state, along with the Taliban, Hezbollah, etc. But generally with Iran, and conservative or radical Islamic political actors overall, there is a good deal of confusion over what side leftists should take.

It’s still of course too early to tell exactly in what direction things are going, if the election really was rigged, what the strength of the anti-Ahmadinejad protests are, who is involved, to what extent they’re being irresponsibly inflated (probably a lot).

UPDATE: Then again, perception is reality, etc. (2nd link via Canavan)

UPDATE2: Some election results (via arabawy)  — check everywhere else for criticism.

But the point is there’s a relationship between wanting freedom for others and claiming freedom for oneself. Especially for anyone who considers themself a radical egalitarian, in this world siding with a national party should always be the option of last resort. I see no reason to voluntarily submit to the stupidity of bad against worse in another country when most of us are already pressured to do so in our own. It’s not ’strategic’ for an actor in the spectacle (a blogger, say) to compromise his or her political or moral views to vicariously ‘participate’ in other peoples’ struggles. Defending Hamas or Hezbollah’s resistance (an extreme example) to Israeli aggression makes the defender neither a subject nor an official ally. On the contrary, protest is necessary when your country is vicariously participating in other peoples’ struggles. Solidarity is with people. Not their states or their twitter profiles. I find it a pretty warped idea of politics that refusal to make a show of obedience to someone else’s party line, especially when there are no material consequences for oneself either way, should be looked on as weakness, incoherence, dilettantism, or ‘bourgeois’ vanity. The opposite is closer to the truth — it is after all the MSM’s favorite propaganda tool to associate its critics with fictional cabals, while affirming the “true desire for freedom and democracy” of “the people.” The mark of the informed-but-still-ignorant pundit is to think of everyone else as the conscious or unconscious minion of a higher power, and of himself as a ghost.

To make an even more general point, I don’t pretend to know what’s best for Iranians, autoworkers, women, or illegal immigrants in their capacity as Iranians, autoworkers, women, or illegal immigrants. Being a media consumer of other peoples’ problems is a privilege. It’s a privilege to be informed free of direct involvement, not to be forced to take a side contrary to one’s real interests and desires. Which is why I am automatically suspicious of any attempt to convince me to give it up in the name of some greater responsibility that has little or nothing to do with my material existence. The ‘irresponsible’ fantasies and inner urges presumed by tragic realism (utopias, lands of Cockaygne, ’savagery’) are figments of its own foreclosed imagination. As a blogger/pundit (an even greater privilege), my only ‘job’ — which in all but the most exceptional cases can only carry hobby status — is to listen, transmit what I hear, and attack lies told at the expense of those struggling to defend themselves.

This is all potentially useful, and I accept no guilt for voyeurism as such. But I can’t “identify” with the televised other, or “see the world through their eyes.” No revelation of exploitative supply chains, no tearjerking column in the New York Times by an ‘authentic’ refugee, no Oscar-winning independent documentary, and no Facebook group, however informative or compelling, can permit me to be them. The media’s most powerful feature requires so little discernible effort by users as to qualify as its ‘unconscious’ effect, what makes both its truths and lies maximally productive. The power to make your problems look like those of other people, and other peoples’ problems look like yours.

The Psychology of Intellectuals

“There is in the course of the Revolution a period of collective incubation during which the first transgressions the masses commit can make one think that the people have become open to all kinds of adventures. This period of psychic regression, which turns out to be quite temporary, plunges libertine minds into a sort of euphoria: there is some chance that the most daring elaborations of individual thought will be put into practice. It now appears to them that what has ripened in their minds because of the degree of decomposition they have individually reached they will be able to sow on fertile ground. They cannot recognize that they are instead as it were the already rotten fruit that is detaching itself from the tree of society; they will fall because they are an end, not a beginning, the end of a long evolution. They forget that the ground receives only the seed, that is, only that part of the universal lesson that their example can hold for posterity. Their dream of giving birth to a humanity like themselves is in contradiction with the very basis of their ripeness, or their lucidity. It is only in the course of crises such as those they have passed through that other individuals, like themselves waste products of the collective process, will be able to reach the same degree of lucidity and thenceforth establish a genuine filiation with them.

As now brutal and unforeseeable decisions of the masses intervene, as the hypostases of new factions are embodied and become laws while the moral and religious authorities of the old hierarchy are emptied of their content, these problematic men suddenly find themselves out of their element and disoriented. In fact they were closely bound up with the sacred values they spat upon. Their libertinage had meaning only at the level they occupied in the fallen society. Now that the throne has been overturned, the severed head of the king is trampled in the dust, the churches are sacked and sacrilege has become an everyday occupation of the masses, these immoralists come to look like eccentrics. They appear as they really were: symptoms of dissolution who have paradoxically survived the dissolution and who cannot integrate themselves into the process of recomposition which the hypostases of a sovereign people, a general will, etc., are bringing about in men’s minds. It would be enough that these men go before the people and before them construct a system out of the fundamental necessity of sacrilege, massacre, and rape, for the masses, who have just committed these offenses, to turn against these philosophers and tear them to pieces with as much satisfaction.

It seems at first sight that here is an insoluble problem: the man of privilege who has reached the supreme degree of consciousness because of a social upheaval is totally unable to make social forces benefit from his lucidity. He is incapable of making the individuals of the mass, which is amorphous but rich in possibilities, identical with himself even for a moment. He seems to occupy his morally advanced position to the detriment of the revolutionary mass. From the point of view of its own preservation, the mass is right, for each time the human mind takes on the incisive aspect of a physiognomy such as Sade’s, it runs the risk of precipitating the end of the whole human condition. Yet the mass is wrong, since it is composed only of individuals, and the individual represents the species intrinsically; and there is no reason why the species should escape the risks involved for it in the success of an individual.”

– Pierre Klossowski, “Sade and the Revolution”

I like to consider the too-typical metaphysics of the last two sentences (and most of the rest of the essay) the cost of admitting the other three paragraphs.

But on to exhibit B:

“Lastly, since leaving Paris, he had withdrawn further and further from reality adn above all from the society of his day, which he regarded with ever-growing horror; this hatred he felt had inevitably affected his literary and artistic tastes, so that he shunned as far as possible pictures and books whose subjects were confined to modern life.

The result was that, losing the faculty of admiring beauty in whatever guise it appeared, he now preferred, among Flaubert’s works, La Tentation de Saint Antoine to L’Éducation sentimentale; among Goncourt’s works, La Faustin to Germinie Lacerteux; among Zola’s works, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret to L’Assommoir.

This seemed to him a logical point of view; these books, not as topical of course but just as stirring and human as the others, let him penetrate further and deeper into the personalities of their authors, who revealed with greater frankness their most mysterious impulses, while they lifted him, too, higher than the rest, out of the trivial existence of which he was so heartily sick.

…

The fact is that when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning for another age.

Unable to attune himself, except at rare intervals, to his environment, and no longer finding in the examination of that environment and the creatures who endure it sufficient pleasures of observation and analysis to divert him, he is aware of the birth and development in himself of unusual phenomena. Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfillment in reflection and study. Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape, and assert themselves with imperious authority. He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord.”

— J. K. Huysmans, À rebours

More Notes on Horror

Here’s a potted history of horror film, cobbled together from the opinions of academics and my own observations, acoompanied by a few examples, All imaginable disclaimers apply.

UPDATE: The most damning of these is that this list is extremely U.S.-Anglo-centric, with other cinemas only entering the list when they were officially recognized as ‘influences’ on the U.S.-Anglo dominated ‘mainstream.’ Sorry.

Precursors:

- Georges Méliès’ cinema of fantasy. J. Stuart Blackton’s The Haunted Hotel (1907) is perhaps most topical if not most relevant.

- German expressionism – especially The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Metropolis (1927), Faust (1926), M. (1931), but also deviations and offshoots like The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Vampyr (1932)

Horror proper:

- the Universal Studios period – from the silents: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Man Who Laughs (1928), to the Golden Age: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), to the generally weak sequels of the 40s like i.e. Son of Dracula (1943) (though don’t forget the exception of The Wolf-Man (1941)),  to the minor ’50s revival led by the sci-fi-tinged Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) — in 3-D — and capped by the ‘canonization’ of the ’30s classics with their move to syndicated TV.

- the Val Lewton/RKO phase – Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Body Snatchers (1945) — largely exists as a distinct stylistic type because of later auteur criticism.

- 1950s Sci-Fi monster thrillers- Thing From Another World (1951), Them! (1954), Gojira (1954), largely aimed at adolescents in drive-thrus; more traditional Gothic elements sneak back in with I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

- Hammer Horror – with the exception of the first, The Quatermass Experiment (1955), this was a (more lurid) return to the Gothic, with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), and the various sequels and spin-offs that went on until around 1974.

- Roger Corman and the ‘B-movie’ – started in the ’50s working in the sci-fi monster genre, but did his best work in the ’60s, including House of Usher (1960), Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Mask of the Red Death (1964) — also notable for the number of careers he helped launch (Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, etc.). Notable non-Corman B’s include Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1964), the first “splatter” film.

Horror’s ‘new wave:’

- ‘psychological’ horror – Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom (1960), The Birds (1963), The Twilight Zone (1959-64) – received and still receives disproportionate attention by critics; the first application of auteur theory to the horror genre, though mostly just Hitchcock.

The highbrow respect garnered for such harrowing fare during this period (beyond middlebrow, which the Universal pictures catered to) initiates what may be horror’s longest-running subgenre, the ‘classy’ horror movie, typically High Gothic in style and produced by A-listers (I also include the ‘demon movies’ subgenre here, in its highbrow form of course). The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), The Exorcist (1973), The Shining (1980), Poltergeist (1982), The Sixth Sense (1999), The Others (2001)

- Italian and Mexican independents of the ’60s-’80s – led by Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Jess Franco – Black Sunday(1960), Blood and Black Lace (1964), Planet of the Vampires (1965), Kill, Baby, Kill! (1966), Suspiria (1977), Tenebre (1982), The Beyond (1981), Justine (1969), Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Alucarda (1978)

- Golden Age of auteurist horror (late 60s-70s) – might as well just list names: George Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, Brian DePalma — thought to have ’sold out’ with John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and the rise of slasher films. Also establishes what remains the ‘official history’ of the horror genre.

- Body-horror (late 70s-80s) – the major auteur here is David Cronenberg. Shivers (1975), Alien (1979), The Thing (1982),Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986) — full of references to the ’50s SF monster movies.

Horror’s ‘decadent’ era:

- Teen slasher movies – Friday the 13th (1980), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the dozens of sequels, rip-offs, and contemporaenous parodies (i.e. Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

- Suburban horror – frequently based on parodic references to earlier subgenres and pop culture more generally. Like the slashers, aimed at suburban teens, but usually far less intense/nihilistic. Contemporaneous both with the rise of video rental and Stephen King-led paperback bestsellers. When not out-and-out absurd tend to be heavy on family values: American Werewolf in London (1981), Cujo (1983), Return of the Living Dead (1985), Fright Night (1985), Evil Dead 2 (1987), Lost Boys (1987), Pet Sematary (1989)

- mainstream horror becomes ‘respectable’ again by assimilating the intensity and gore levels of the previous few decades with the pedigree of subjects derived either from the ‘classic’ ’30s (and consequently literature), or psychological, ‘Hitchcockian’ thrillers  – Silence of the Lambs (1991), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Wolf (1994), Seven (1997). Interview with the Vampire (1994) probably belongs here as well.

- (re-)ironizing of the genre, TV-centric but also auteurist in a weird way – The X-Files (1993-2002), Scream (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)

- ‘new authenticity’ – includes (though maybe these should be distinguished) non-traditional, ‘underground’ sources (Blair Witch Project (1999), low-budget ‘world cinema’ imports like Ringu (1998)) and ostensibly straight-faced reproductions, mostly of the ’70s or ’80s (Saw (2003), Hostel (2005), the innumerable remakes and reboots, etc.) and with increased gore.

—

What interests me the most about this are the ‘ironizing’ moments, where the history of the genre is (re) established, and alternately portrayed as dumb, naive, reactionary, misogynist, authentic, etc. Seems to coincide both with auteurist phases and when critics identify ‘radical potential’ and/or subversiveness. Should be distinguished from its comedy and pastiche-oriented counterparts (the late ’80s and ’00s, respectively).

Notes on Horror

“Certainly I will never again take for granted that audience males identify solely or even mainly with screen males and audience females with screen females. If Carrie, whose story begins and ends with menstrual imagery and seems in general so painfully girlish, is construed by her author as a latter-day variant on Samson, the biblical strong man who overcame all manner of handicap to kill at least six thousand Philistines in one way or another, and if her target audience is any high school boy who has been pantsed or had his glasses messed with, then we are truly in a universe in which the sex of a character is no object. No accident, insofar as it is historically and, above all, politically overdetermined, but also no object — no impediment whatever to the audience’s experience of his or her function. That too is one of the bottom-line propositions of horror, a proposition that is easily missed when you watch mainstream cinema but laid bare in exploitation cinema and, once registered, never lets you see any movie ’straight’ again.”

– Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992)

This striking paragraph makes clear that while the horror film as a whole has never been primarily about reinforcing the current patriarchal status quo, neither has it ever been about ‘celebrating difference.’ Regardless of how politically reactionary or radical the individual filmmakers, the genre has instead been progressive, in the bourgeois avant-garde sense of making the erasure of differences a violent spectacle. Underlying the rest of Clover’s book on changing gender roles in horror is a second narrative, variation on an old story, in which mainstream cinema first resisted then assimilated the extreme boundary-crossing of the low-budget, indie and semi-indie horror of the ’60s-’80s, now read in auteurist terms: things like the gore, the gender-bending, hermaphroditic figures, the mixed identification between stalker and victim/hero, the faux-vérité camera work, and the tone, constantly shifting between quasi-snuff and self-parody. When Silence of the Lambs swept the major Oscars (the genre’s moment of gentrification), the rules for popular cinema had plainly changed. By Kill Bill, they had been replaced.

*

The critics who missed the point, whether mainstream moralists or academics, mistakenly assumed horror filmmakers make things frightening in order to make them unappealing. Thus Robin Wood, who prefers that monsters be represented in (conventionally) sympathetic terms, says of Shivers (1975), an early David Cronenberg about nympho zombies, “it is a film single-mindedly about sexual liberation, a prospect it views with unmitigated horror…Shivers systematically chronicles the breaking of every sexual-social taboo — promiscuity, lesbianism, homosexuality, age difference, and finally, incest — but each step is presented as merely one more addition to the accumulation of horrors. At the same time, the film shows absolutely no feeling for traditional relationships (or for human beings, for that matter): with its unremitting ugliness and crudity, it is very rare in its achievement of total negation.”

Total negation, however, is a term best used to describe most mainstream films of the ’70s, in which homosexuality either didn’t exist or appeared as unthreatening comic relief. Shivers, on the other hand, is an affirmation of sexual revolution which is simultaneously denied to be possible. Horror’s aesthetic has always been negative. What horror makes hideous is what it desires, and not what it pretends to morally justify. Underline makes — the construction and shooting of the monster, or the gore effect, the performance of the villain, like the viewing of the above, is the chief source of pleasure for everyone involved in the genre’s reproduction. The accumulation of horrors ensures the pleasure of producing and consuming horror film.

The events and characters depicted in these photoplays are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

*

In a history of forms, one notices an increasing degree of indifference in the horror genre to traditional distinctions of all kinds. Those constitutive of the capitalist social body (or ‘civil society’): gender, class, race, sexual preference, etc., but also between monsters and between genres. The zombie subgenre is the latest realization of a long trend, traceable from the Gothic hybridizations of science, folklore, and literature to produce what Franco Moretti calls “totalizing monsters,” Draculas and Frankensteins, demons which refuse traditional categories, whose true horror is their inevitable promise to ‘go viral.’

That is, their threat is not due to their powers (easily altered to suit contemporary needs, thus guaranteeing ‘timelessness’), or their function as signs of a greater (Satanic) evil. The queer aristocratic vampire, immortal, the bestiality of the wolf-man and Mr. Hyde, the implied sexual perversion of the psycho killer, reduce a system of social differences to some founding trauma that defines the monstrous archetype. Its supernatural power is also its curse, the evidence of its exclusion from modern society, a mutation it threatens to replicate in the population at large. Monsters thus mediate social violence, substituting in an alternative mechanism, which as far as I can tell has always been some pseudo-biologial form of infection.

*

Between the unreal monster and the normal functioning of society, a fantastic, unbelievable narrative implies a deliberately spurious social theory, one that pretends to offer universal history complete with future apocaplypse. The ‘modern,’ ‘totalizing’ monster is formally parodic, but with no clear object beyond its own genre history.

*

Buffy is one possible apotheosis of horror, close in style to Tarantino and in tone to Scream. It adroitly stages a reconciliation between the horror genre and anyone who could possibly find it disturbing or offensive, by inviting its audience to replicate its cast, a ‘nerdy’ clique that isn’t socially disadvantaged, unfashionably misogynist, or even very awkward. The “Scooby gang” is a morally ambiguous secret elite, who while using the same skill set as Dungeons & Dragons, engage in the far more productive activity of ethnic cleansing. We don’t really notice this, though, as the the show makes a point of ‘not taking seriously’ its one truly horrific premise, preferring instead traditonal soap opera, blended with a kind of simulacral ‘nerd culture’ composed of various trivia categories which are referenced in clever ways. The nerd demographic gets to flirt with legitimacy, and the ‘average viewer’ gets another flavor of ‘ironic’ romantic outsider. Everybody wins.

*

The other is the faux universalism of the zombie virus, which completes horror’s reduction of this colorful gallery of ’supernatural’ deviances to the dialectic of life (vitalistic, soulful, individual) vs. death (automatic, dull, anonymous). ‘Sexy’ monsters are nowhere to be found. The apparently innocent gesture of speeding up the zombies, employed in 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, by eliminating their intrinsic silliness, further reduces Romero’s often witty play with the roles of collective ‘monsters’ and individual ‘protagonists’ into a contentless opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The difference between human and zombie now seems based on a kind of bone-crunching nominalism, with self and other replaced by proxy and object.

Space Cowboys

An unused ending for Terminator: Salvation had John Connor, the prophesied hero of the franchise, die and the Terminator-human hybrid (first introduced in this film) secretly take over his identity and authority as speculative messiah. Not only would this ending have provided a logical reason for why John Connor is so special (he’s a robot superman!), it would have been a logical progression of the earlier films’ gradual breakdown of the distinction between human and machine, putting the sophistication of the series about on par with science fiction stories published 50 years ago. Whether due to the early leak or not, the ending was replaced with a straight-from-the-playbook coda where the hybrid sacrifices himself to save Connor and preserve the brand image of ‘humanity’ (read: the vintage form of Hollywood-produced American narcissism). The future will be bleak, we’re told, but it will go on! Ultimately the movie does what all these reboots are supposed to do: lay the groundwork for sequels that can’t possibly be interesting, and which exist to legitimate the rest of the product line.

Hollywood’s thematic paradigm is convincingly laid out in Robert Ray’s Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema (hat tip chabert): an ‘outlaw’ hero (or villain), representing the values of spontaneity and individualism, meets an ‘official’ hero, representing social connectedness and responsibility to moral norms, and their confrontation is resolved in a way that overcomes the apparent necessity for choosing between them. “The American mythology’s refusal to choose between its two heroes went beyond the normal reconciliatory function attributed to myth by Lévi-Strauss. For the American tradition not only overcame binary oppositions; it systematically mythologized the certainty of being able to do so.” From here we get the stock set of variations and composites, presented with varying levels of irony and self-awareness. The most common by far is the reluctant hero archetype: the rugged individualist drawn out of isolation for one last spectacular act of violence before riding off into the sunset.

In Terminator, Michael Worthington, ex-con resurrected in the future as a cyborg, is the outlaw and reluctant hero, while Christian Bale, machine-slaying messiah, efficiently reprises his narrative function from 3:10 to Yuma and Batman as the official hero.* In another successful reboot, Star Trek, the relationship between Kirk (outlaw captain) and Spock (official sidekick) is exaggerated to the point of absurdity: Kirk is a character from a college sex comedy, and reconciliation is achieved when he forces Spock to admit he feels bad that his home planet was destroyed, thereby ‘revealing’ his true emotional nature (revealed also through unconvincing makeout scenes with Uhura). Both films praise ‘humans’ for their irrational willingness to put themselves and others at risk without adequate justification.

What this constitutive split between outlaw and official always amounts to is a split between the moral center and the interest center of the story. From Dirty Harry to the Joker (whether hero or villain), the assumed audience always roots for the outlaw no matter what the voice over says. When it comes to the problem of narrative resolution, which would seem to necessitate resolving this contradiction, the future presents itself as a wide open field, and the ideal Hollywood adventure fades out on an ever-receding horizon. Things get dicier with expensive franchises. Continuity and the establishment of a fictional history are added to the list of formal demands.

In comics this is typically managed according to the logic laid out by Umberto Eco in “The Myth of the Superman,” where both plot and the aesthetics of the form are geared toward sustaining an eternal present. Any narrative movement (Bruce Wayne gets put on trial! Spider-Man gets married!) is contained in miniseries format and marketed for all it’s worth. When a critical mass of narrative information is reached, the publishers launch a big multiseries ‘crisis,’ shake things up a little, then ‘retcon’ their way back to a relative equilibrium state (which incidentally has been happening more and more often). In network TV the rhythm of narrative development, the ratio between it and stasis, has to be timed according to volatile ratings. Despite its often bizarre pacing, it can and does develop narrative, albeit one that, as in comics, tends to escalate complexity instead of ‘going anywhere’ thematically.

Hollywood, having far more expensive individual units, has had to proceed by eliminating the interest center and starting over with a new one every time. This means that the favored solution to the narrative problem, the reluctant hero, is not an option. The hero has to continue being heroic, and given the huge special effects budgets, nothing ‘minor’ or forgettable can ever happen (for the characters of course, not for us). Indeed, the more history a franchise character has, the more innocent he must be. Batman, though grim, is always naïvely fixated on the same traumatic event. Jason Bourne has the built-in mechanism of amnesia. John Connor has prophetic knowledge and years of combat experience yet is easily manipulated. It’s the outlaws without history, the divine/satanic innocents, who have the greatest wisdom, who have seen reality for what it is. Actual character development would risk leaving this tried-and-true generic structure behind. Best not even to suggest it beyond the first entry, where its perfunctory deployment is not just to reaffirm the American-Hollywood myth (as with the ‘one-shot’ Western or action movie), but to (re)establish an individual brand. The franchise, however strong its start, is driven by ‘the market’ to greater and greater heights of hysterical violence, mercilessly violating its own premises in the interest of ‘brand sustainability.’

Call it the visual economy of prolonged adolescence. Or just the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex. Same difference, really.

Until expectations for film franchises devolve to the nadir of video games, where each sequel is expected by players and critics to update the experience of the previous game with new technology – and Terminator seemed to be heading in this direction – then any franchise will be driven to foreclose its history by ‘terminating’ (sorry) its means of narrative progress. While this hardly matters to management, change is still a necessity, though you wouldn’t know it simply from consuming the products by themselves. At the brute level of maximizing returns, it doesn’t really make sense for a franchise to ‘reinvent itself’ until after it becomes unprofitable in its initial form. Then, years later, it can return ‘with a vengeance.’ James Bond, Star Trek, and Star Wars are the great success stories.

One could argue that every franchise has the elimination of history in general as its more or less obvious subtext (I’m told that in the Terminator TV show the constant time traveling completely extends the apocalyptic man-machine battlefield into the present). This is certainly their function. The nostalgic distance separating adulthood from its childhood entertainment, or the entertainments of the previous generation, is never allowed to mature. Instead it is simply understood as something that adds value to a brand, akin to letting a field lay fallow in preparation for the eventual harvest.

For those of us born and raised in the ’70s-‘80s, the familiar criticism from ‘fanboys’ that Hollywood is raping our memories is literally true. In corporate culture production, time is treated as callously as space is in manufacturing and ‘development.’ We had the misfortune to grow up dreaming dreams that were corporate property. It’s in this sense that history itself isn’t allowed to become history, and memory isn’t allowed to stay memory, common or otherwise. As Ray argues, all Hollywood films have done this implicitly, recycling a narrow set of tropes and formal strategies while assimilating (rather than being fundamentally changed by) outside developments, whether in the area of historical/political change or aesthetic innovation. Contemporary fantasy franchises are just explicit manifestations of Ray’s “certain tendency.” The social space they reproduce has more in common with Circe’s illusory pleasure island than the barren Infernos they tend to depict.

*Incidentally, I’m also wondering how the most recent Hollywood action stars all got to be foreigners. Much like the similarly hysterically conservative 1980s it seems Hollywood in the ‘00s is interested in importing its beefcake from overseas.

Culture = So ’90s

The ’90s were culture’s last hurrah. I won’t bore you with the list of ‘cultural innovations’ that originated in the ’90s (ok here’s a few: rave, mashup, jungle, reality TV, Onion/Daily Show joke news, MMORPGs, indie rock, Britpop, crunk, grunge, hipsters). In a conversation with some friends we agreed on 9/11/2001 as the ’90s’ proper cutoff date (as 11/11-12/1989 was its proper beginning). The dominant form of radical politics in the West — anti-capitalist, direct action oriented anarchism — had its climax in the 1999 action in Seattle, and has been drawing on more or less the same operational principles. K-punk has been complaining about this for a while; see here for his latest:

Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?

Those of us who grew up in the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s became accustomed to rapid changes in popular culture. Theorists of future shock such as Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan plausibly claimed that our nervous systems were themselves sped up by these developments, which were driven by the development and proliferation of technologies. Popular artefacts were marked with a technological signature that dated them quite precisely: new technology was clearly audible and visible, so that it would be practically impossible, say, to confuse a film or a record from the early 1960s with one from even half a decade later.

The current decade, however, has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration. A thought experiment makes the point. Imagine going back 15 years in time to play records from the latest dance genres – dubstep, or funky, for example – to a fan of jungle. One can only conclude that they would have been stunned – not by how much things had changed, but by how little things have moved on. Something like jungle was scarcely imaginable in 1989, but dubstep or funky, while by no means pastiches, sound like extrapolations from the matrix of sounds established a decade and a half ago.

Needless to say, it is not that technology has ceased developing. What has happened, however, is that technology has been decalibrated from cultural form.

And just to drive the point home, here’s something awful that just came out:

Just execrable, really. All the latest tricks of pop music from the last two years: the beefed-up 808 beats, the vocoder gliss, the sci-fi aesthetic, the marketable female vocalist teamed with inoffensive hip-hoppers (all of which really date back to the ’70s or ’80s and electro), wrapped into a single iTunes ready package, the function of a product like this is to fill up the club, announce to hipsters that the latest phase is ‘dead,’ and prepare the way for Kanye to introduce the next mild remix of the pop culture of the last 50 years. I found this video here (a ‘culturally relevant’ blog), as part of a funny bit of consumer advocacy/tastemaking. The blogger, inspired by the brazen cynicism of the above, fantasizes about being naive enough to straightforwardly enjoy it:

Sort of just want to be ‘a stupid mainstreamer’ who gets pumped up when I heard a song like Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” or the song “Let’s Get it Started.”

I want to be a white person
who ‘gets jacked up’
whenever a black person in ‘cool clothes’
comes out, waves their arms
rhymes into a mic
and tells the crowd to ‘get on their feet.’

I will go home
buy this popular song on iTunes
listen to it when I ’start my workout’
to ‘get fucking pumped up’
then choose a slow song 4 my ‘cool down’

What this ‘poem’ recognizes in its very act of critique is that there is no such thing as ’straightforward enjoyment’ of this song, which is objectively tired — either you admit it or you don’t, or you don’t listen to pop music enough to care either way. Setting aside fan loyalty to the band (theoretically possible), it’s not a song that inspires partisanship; even to those who profess to like it, it can be nothing more than a mass product; enjoyment of it is strictly culinary. As per the norm of modernist criticism, the loss mourned by both k-punk and ‘carles’ of hipsterrunoff is the attitude that would deny this ‘general’ or ‘common’ complacency toward culture a position of normative authority.

What has already been noted is that this narrative of cultural vacancy is overwhelmingly white, (probably) male, not a little techno-centric, and elitist in a way that feels quixotic (all registered ironically by the latter commenter and not at all by the very earnest k-punk). ‘Cultural form,’ when used as the scoring rubric according to which the ’00’s are lacking, should not be confused with a mere empirical analytic. Built into this notion are the aesthetic criteria for determining excellence, the potential for the emergence of masterpieces, and the legitimacy of criticism, criteria which only make sense within the history of European bourgeois aesthetics (see Francis Mulhern on the authority granted to culture here).

There is a left version of this among critical modernists like Fredric Jameson, where a culture is expected to go beyond the ideology of the New and produce the means of criticizing, or at least ‘mapping’ (though the visual metaphor is not really apt) its context; the equivalent of a masterpiece here would be anything from which a critic could derive knowledge beyond the fact(s) of the object itself, and could come from virtually any cultural sector; from popular entertainment to the avant-garde. A Jamesonian masterpiece is didactic, albeit in a special, often ‘unconscious’ sense. A masterpiece within postmodernism — a general situation where masterpieces are impossible — would have to be some sort of throwback, somehow outside of its own time. Which, or so I like to fantasize, is why Jameson became a theorist and not a novelist.

“Yet once this initial disjunction between the present and the New is granted, the inevitable stages of a decline, the progressive decadence of an inauthentic modernism, follow logically enough. For the New, and the break it stages with tradition, now quickly unmasks itself as a commitment, not to the present but to the future. It thereby generates spurious narratives about the development of art in general, in which the discredited bourgeois value of progress is secretly or not so secretly installed in the aesthetic realm.” (Jameson, “Transformations of the Image”)

He goes on to attack the anti-theoretical pseudo-aestheticism that tends to replace the rejection of (pseudo) modernism, and which feeds into the “nostalgia film” and the spurious, neo-Romantic ‘return’ to beauty, religion, and folk culture. The point is that there is no simple alternative direction being offered; it’s an impasse, its causes more or less identified. Which is why k-punk’s use of Jamesonian motifs have always seemed to me to fall within the latter’s critique of postmodern pastiche. It is only possible to assert Jameson himself as an arbiter of taste if the untimely irony of his style is erased, if the Adornian dialectics are dropped out and he is turned into a kind of Spinozist. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but would necessitate the abandonment of any pretension to critical theory and the very notion of cultural politics as a quasi-autonomous sphere of activity.

The avant-garde modernism of forms is not an ‘alternative;’ it is the historical background of our current situation. In a properly Spinozist universe, if the public intellectual can’t or won’t engage directly in left politics he must become an adman.

But let’s return to the argument about the disjunct between technological and cultural development. YouTube, blogs, and the rest of the Web 2.0 apparatus are mere technical platforms according to this logic: the means of production of cultural form and not forms themselves. This entails a rather strange relation between culture and technology, where changes in the latter are supposed to catalyze changes in the former without  determining them, and the depth of cultural change is to be evaluated solely from within the inherited cultural discourses: those of art, music, and pop culture criticism. A new technology is not a new cultural form. Culture’s “decalibration” from technology, then, indicates the failure of new ‘technological’ products to meet ‘cultural’ criteria. By this I mean criticism cannot read any of these new objects as even potentially masterpieces without straining credibility.

Jameson’s theory of postmodernism names this cultural failure and connects it to developments in capitalist political economy since WWII and the rise of consumer society. What I want to suggest is that the ideological discourse of novelty and innovation should be understood to include the actual development of new technologies. For the past 30 years at least, technological innovation has been tied to the fluctuating demands of financialized consumer capitalism. Like the television, the iPod is both a technical and an ideological product. On what basis could theories of cultural innovation even theoretically be divorced from those of technical innovation, or financial innovation for that matter? Culture’s calibration with technology is postmodern ideology.

The shift over the past 20 years or so is in how we are now trained to experience both technological and cultural development, and how the ‘innovations’ themselves are designed to look, feel, and function: not as a series of revolutionary shocks a la Toffler and McLuhan, but as a numb, predictable wave of tweaks and ‘updates.’ Cable to wireless; iPod to iPhone; MySpace to Facebook; Blogspot to Tumblr. As velocity increases, change of every kind is normalized, routine, invisible. Ray Kurzweil, the Toffler of our day, gives us the fantasized radical telos for all this high-speed incrementalism: “what will the Singularity look like to people who want to remain biological? The answer is that they really won’t notice it, except for the fact that machine intelligence will appear to biological humanity to be their transcendent servants….there’s a lot that, in fact, biological humanity won’t actually notice.” It’s capitalist common sense that the promise of  ‘authentic’ change on the modernist model is how various competing interests perpetuate themselves. Every attempt to read it otherwise is just another ad.

We aren’t living through the breakdown of culture’s dependence on technology but its culmination, the near-fusion of content and form and the omnipresence of culture as novelty. It’s therefore pointless to expect new ‘cultural forms’ to emerge from new media, where it’s all about the platform. With Web 2.0, McLuhan’s “medium is the message” slogan is now true on the most banal level. We may have, gradually, inched our way past the context in which ideas like ‘cognitive mapping’ and ‘new cultural forms’ had purchase as critical aesthetics, centered as they were around distinct works, around individual, intellectual comprehension and consumption. Mapping now is distributed among multiple ‘works’ — instances of participation — each of which is unthinkable on its own. This new connectivity has a variety of possible uses as well as risks, most of which are illegible to 20th century aesthetic theories incapable of acknowledging anything not a celebrity masterpiece, war, or revolution.

Traditional cultural (and political) practice of course continues at all levels, continuing to demonstrate, despite what the hipsters say, that the trajectory of mass culture is not destiny. And this whole chain of reflections was inspired by the apocalyptic troika of economic, ecological, and energy crisis, the awareness that the bourgeois progress narrative in all its various generic forms is a destructive and suicidal fantasy, a junky dream. Seeing these imminent disasters as a challenge for ‘culture’ to regain ’symbolic efficacy’ is to remain enlisted in its reproduction. The full-color, hi-def imagination of real alternatives cannot precede the behaviors that actually discover them. That’s because the other worlds, the ones outside whatever features one might hate about capitalist popular culture and its various ghettoes of self-righteous self-loathing, have always already been here.

May Day

According to Peter Linebaugh’s pamphlet history, May Day has both ‘red’ and ‘green’ origins, and has traditionally been a time when humorless commies and libertine tree-huggers can put aside their differences and be excellent to each other.
Here’s my favorite tale:

In 1625 Captain Wollaston, Thomas Morton, and thirty others sailed from England and months later, taking their bearings from a red cedar tree, they disembarked in Quincy Bay. A year later Wollaston, impatient for lucre and gain, left for good to Virginia. Thomas Morton settled in Passonaggessit which he named Merry Mount. The land seemed a “Paradise” to him. He wrote, there are “fowls in abundance, fish in multitudes, and I discovered besides, millions of turtle doves on the green boughs, which sat pecking of the full, ripe, pleasant grapes that were supported by the lusty trees, whose fruitful load did cause the arms to bend.”

On May Day, 1627, he and his Indian friends, stirred by the sound of drums, erected a Maypole eighty feet high, decorated it with garlands, wrapped it in ribbons, and nailed to its top the antlers of a buck. Later he wrote that he “sett up a Maypole upon the festival day of Philip and James, and therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beare.” A ganymede sang a Bacchanalian song. Morton attached to the pole the first lyric verses penned in America which concluded.

With the proclamation that the first of May

At Merry Mount shall be kept holly day

The Puritans at Plymouth were opposed to the May Day. they called the Maypole “an Idoll” and named Merry Mount “Mount Dagon” after the god of the first ocean-going imperialist, the Phoenicians. More likely, though the Puritans were the imperialist, not Morton, who worked with slaves, servants, and native Americans, person to person. Everyone was equal in his “social contract.” Governor Bradford wrote, “they allso set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days together, inviting the Indean women for thier consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many faires, or furies rather) and worse practise.”

Merry Mount became a refuge for Indians, the discontented, gay people, runaway servants, and what the governor called “all the scume of the countrie.” When the authorities reminded him that his actions violated the King’s Proclamation, Morton replied that it was “no law.” Miles Standish, whom Morton called “Mr. Shrimp,” attacked. The Maypole was cut down. The settlement was burned. Morton’s goods were confiscated, he was chained in the bilboes, and ostracized to England aboard the ship “The Gift,” at a cost the Puritans complained of twelve pounds seven shillings. The rainbow coalition of Merry Mount was thus destroyed for the time being. That Merry Mount later (1636) became associated with Anne Hutchinson, the famous mid-wife, spiritualist, and feminist, surely was more than
coincidental. Her brother-in-law ran the Chapel of Ease. She thought that god loved everybody, regardless of their sins. She doubted the Puritans’ authority to make law. A statue of Robert Burns in Quincy near to Merry Mount, quotes the poet’s lines,

A fig for those by law protected!

Liberty’s a glorious feast!

Courts for cowards were erected,

Churches built to please the priest.

Thomas Morton was a thorn in the side of the Boston and Plymouth Puritans, because he had an alternate vision of Massachusetts. He was impressed by its fertility; they by its scarcity. He befriended the Indians; they shuddered at the thought. He was egalitarian; they proclaimed themselves the “Elect”. He freed servants; they lived off them. He armed the Indians; they used arms against Indians. To Nathaniel Hawthorne, the destiny of American settlement was decided at Merry Mount. Casting the struggle as mirth vs. gloom, grizzly saints vs. gay sinners, green vs. iron, it was the Puritans who won, and the fate of America was determined in favor of psalm-singing, Indian-scalpers whose notion of the Maypole was a whipping post.

Parts of the past live, parts die. The red cedar that drew Morton first to Merry Mount blew down in the gale of 1898. A section of it, about eight feet of its trunk became a power fetish in 1919, placed as it was next to the President’s chair of the Quincy City Council. Interested parties may now view it in the Quincy Historical Museum. Living trees, however, have since grown, despite the closure of the ship-yards.

Perhaps this makes me a reactionary, but I don’t trust utopian stories that don’t end in tragedy — not because of a metaphysical conviction in the impossibility of human happiness, but because I like my tales to be, if only in an oblique sense, historically accurate.

Which means I both like and am uncomfortable with the way Linebaugh ends it:

Where is the Red and Green today? Is it in Mao’s Red Book? or in Col. Khadafy’s Green Book? Some perhaps. Leigh Hunt, the English essayist of the 19th century, wrote that May Day is “the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature, and the love of each other.” Certainly, such green union is possible, because we all can imagine it, and we know that what is real now was once only imagined. Just as certainly, that union can be realized only by red struggle, because there is no gain without pain, as the aerobiticians say, or no dreams without responsibility, no birth without labor, no green without red.

As a commentor points out, where are the anarchists? It’s an amusing hypocritical foible of mine (and I’m sure is not only mine) that I have a working student-level knowledge of Marxism, am developing one in ecological leftism, and know next to nothing about anarchism; this despite the fact that my few actual experiences of political involvement on the left have been basically anarchist in orientation. This is not very materialist. As usual, I don’t feel guilty. Just incoherent.

Happy May Day.

Tragedy of the Commons

Attending the left forum this year was a fine if exhausting time (The Pace University building’s design strategy of putting windows in the hallways but not the classrooms reminded me once again that I don’t understand modern architecture). The panels were numerous and varied, a high proportion sounded interesting, and the tiny proportion I attended were excellent. Read reports by more famous bloggers Louis Proyect and Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb (who was also a speaker) here, here, and here. Doug Henwood’s talk is here, and a response here. Rather than give a report on every panel, I only want to concentrate on one basic theme, though one that has many twists and turns.

Which is, observations/predictions of the future of American (and more generally ‘Western’) ideology. Depending on who you ask, the end of neoliberalism will inevitably occur when the zombie march of bank bailouts and credit-fueled military adventures encounters its absolute limit with the collapse of the U.S. domestic economy (I am more skeptical). But whether or not neoliberalism as a more or less coherent strategy and set of policies is finished, the ideology of free market evangelism with the U.S. military as security hegemon is certainly ‘bankrupt,’ even in the most conservative press. What will replace it? This is implicitly also a question of what will be the new dynamic sector of the ‘global’ economy.

Let’s go with green technology and green jobs, just because it appears to be the only sane choice. Iain Boal reminded us that not even objective necessity necessarily guarantees anything: Obama’s energy secretary Steven Chu is pitching the environmental crisis as an engineering problem to be solved in large part by heavy investment in synthetic biology and biofuels — which unfortunately seem to be an unconvincing proposition for Wall Street, driving a number of the biofuel distilleries into bankruptcy. Nuclear would seem to be the most economically feasible option at this point at the rate politicians keep cautiously talking it up. But while solar power doesn’t seem to be doing much better than biofuel, neither does nuclear (let’s just not bring up coal). One is inevitably reminded of Carter’s failed attempt at an eco-revolution in the ’70s…and then one must think about something else.

So let’s say the socialists are right, and freedom doesn’t work. Say someone at the top finally figures that out, or is forced to from below, and we get our Green New Deal. Where’s the other shoe? Seymour was part of a panel on market ideology’s better half: human rights (here’s one of his many posts on the subject). Historian Samuel Moyn argued that key components missing from human rights (and present in Enlightenment formulations of natural/universal rights) are those that involve social and economic rights, and strong support for the political right of self-determination — by the 1970s, any pretense of these older concerns had fallen away, a development coinciding with the rise of ‘free market,’ dollar-regime-driven neoliberalism. He described human rights as a form of Victorian philanthropic ideology, a sort of ‘realism’ which functions to deny the possibility of any solution to mass suffering beyond charity while justifying violent military intervention as needed.  During the Q&A,  someone asked if a much-speculated-upon shift to realpolitik would negate future Clinton-style humanitarian intervention. The answer that this is the script that typically follows the period of adventurist ‘idealism’ — “we tried to give them freedom, but clearly all they’re capable of is stability” — seems convincing enough. Human rights should not be understood as the basis for policy. Though it sometimes returns as blowback (i.e. Guantanamo and the Gaza strip) the framework seems vague enough to remain nonbinding, regardless of how aggressive the state is in using it as a pretext for war.

The construction of this emerging narrative, centering around a global reduction of aspiration, seems basically to involve the throwing up of ghosts of the past in the hopes that something will stick. From where I’m sitting, they focus around three major genres: the 1930s (depression, FDR as iconic patriarch and healer of class conflict), the 1970s (energy crisis, green whatnot) and finally the 1890s. The flipside to Victorian philanthropy is Victorian imperial administration, as (self-consciously) personified by Robert Kagan in this recent piece. Here he is reading the ruling class its horoscope:

“Realist” is now a mark of respect, “neocon” a term of derision. The Vietnam analogy has vanquished that of Munich. Thomas Hobbes, who extolled the moral benefits of fear and saw anarchy as the chief threat to society, has elbowed out Isaiah Berlin as the philosopher of the present cycle. The focus now is less on universal ideals than particular distinctions, from ethnicity to culture to religion. Those who pointed this out a decade ago were sneered at for being “fatalists” or “determinists.” Now they are applauded as “pragmatists.” And this is the key insight of the past two decades—that there are worse things in the world than extreme tyranny, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say this having supported the war.

So now, chastened, we have all become realists. Or so we believe. But realism is about more than merely opposing a war in Iraq that we know from hindsight turned out badly. Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom?

And then comes the form of this harsh, purifying knowledge, the new science of society:

And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.

Bureaucratic and economic networks alike find their real ontological ground in the ground itself. The most natural of social sciences provides a new language of globalization, a new way to bypass the claims of rogue and ‘failed’ states. Kagan renders computer and even trade networks phobic. Always open to contamination by nuclear arms, terrorist hate, and uncontrolled populations against which the epidermal layer of national boundaries becomes less and less effective, the world is in need of a new kind of policing for which he will supply the transcendental logic. He counterposes his geographic/strategic realism to liberal humanism and universalism, slyly relying on its homnymy with economic liberalism, the very thing it was supposed to moderate, to bury economic reason even more deeply within the unconscious.

At the same time as it is political realism, we can also call Kagan’s positon the extreme right wing of the new environmental movement: the uninhibited revival of Malthus and MacKinder, the elimination of history in favor of directly using terrain and resource control as a way of controlling political ‘realities.’ As long as we don’t forget the role a certain kind of liberal environmentalism plays in legitimizing its right wing counterpart, keeping both in play for actual decision makers to employ whenever it suits them. The last generation included figures like Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich and Garrett “Tragedy of the Commons” Hardin. The key feature of this group is not so much the metaphysical Malthusian assumptions about fixed population growth rates and absolute ‘carrying capacity’ (though those are, amazingly, a recurring problem), but the idea that nature contains social laws we are obligated first to discover and then abide by. My suspicion is that Jared Diamond is the new chief spokesperson, but I haven’t read enough to say much more than that.

Again though, what someone like Kagan offers to the world’s bosses is not a set of rules to follow or ideal solutions to implement, but something more like freedom of movement — ideological flexibility.

Regardless of how the economic crisis is solved, or even if it’s not, it seems to me hopelessly naive at this point to think that a good solution will be arrived at through right argument. A proposal along these lines is just a potential tool with a certain set of use-values. The more easily it can travel, the more comprehensive it is, the more easily it lends itself to use by the most powerful as ideology. Doug Henwood and David Harvey’s hand waves toward “creeping socialism” at the conference, where alternatives to capitalist institutions are designed and employed at the local level, more or less gradually displacing existing structures — coupled with occasional campaigns to shift policy in more favorable directions — still seems like the most effective way to build the base that everyone on the left knows we don’t have. Without the capacity to realize them ourselves, all our great ideas are just fodder for the open source think tank.